I think this makes most sense. I would understand it to mean ions missing one electron as opposed to those missing 2 electrons (or something like that - school was a long time ago!)
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paulJun 8 '11 at 12:23

@Tim N If the meaning were "consists simply of charged ions" it would be besteht einfach aus geladenen ionen, if it were "consists of simply charged ions" (as opposed to charged and painted red) besteht aus einfach geladenen ionen. In that case, the german sentence would be ambiguous, and you would probably substitute einfach with simpel, lediglich or nur ("only").
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fzwoJun 8 '11 at 13:16

@fzwo: Right, I was only thinking of the first variant "consists simply of charged ions". The second variant sounds a bit strange for ions, but einfach would indeed be ambiguous. However, I can't see that simpel would work here - lediglich sounds a lot better.
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Hendrik VogtJun 8 '11 at 13:37

Attention guys. In this context "einfach" specifies the difference between the amount of positive protons and the negative electrons of a atom. If there is a gap of one electron, this Ion is "einfach geladen". Therefore I agree with splattne, but I have a bad feeling with some comments below. The Ion is not "easily loaded", it is loaded "once".

If I'm going to stress my english knowledge somewhat more, I would say noone. It was just a feeling that the discussion about a possible ambiguous interpretation of "einfach" blurres the intention of the original sentence. But even this is significant for a student (Tim N). Sorry if I've upset you, this was not my intention. Do you want my answer to edit? Feel free.
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MarkusJun 9 '11 at 13:58

Sorry, you surely didn't upset me; I just thought that you might have misunderstood that other comment discussion. As I said there, for ions this would be strange, but my understanding was that Tim wanted to know the various ways to use "einfach" not just for ions. (If you want to change the wording of your answer, then you could say more specifically that some of those comments might be misleading for the casual reader since one never says that ions are "lediglich geladen".)
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Hendrik VogtJun 9 '11 at 14:04